THE POLITICS OF POPULAR MOVEMENTS RECONSIDERED

We now no longer live within the Cold War/Keynesian/social-democratic/developmental-state historical sequence and the subjective politics associated with it. Today, neo-liberal economics and politics have replaced state-led economic transformation with market-led growth along with massive unemployment and poverty levels, while so-called deregulation and privatisation have devastated state social-provisioning infrastructure worldwide. At the same time, the current form of colonialism is not only globalised, but has replaced its ‘civilising mission’ (and ‘development mission’) with a liberalising and ‘democratising mission’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007; Neocosmos, 2009b). Neo-liberal market capitalism and its attendant political liberal-democratic norms are everywhere hegemonic in thought, although people throughout the world have been showing disaffection with the liberal political system. In this context, the neo-liberal state in Africa has been ruling – ensuring its legitimacy – less through the operation of parties and more by institutionalising the operation of civil society organ-isations, in particular NGOs. It is in this context of the decline in legitimacy of parties that civil society organisations have been seen as a form of popular incorporation into state politics and as legitimisers of the ‘democratic consensus’. On the other hand, so-called new social movements (which, at least in Europe, have now become directly embedded in the state) are regularly seen as holding the key to an emancipatory future. Too often, though, such movements have shown highly contradictory features and the majority have simply been operating within an interest politics that is state-founded.

It is in South Africa that the study of social movements is probably most developed on the continent. However, this literature remains squarely within the perspective of the Western ‘sociology of social movements’ while largely ignoring equivalent material from Asia, Latin America and Africa. It is not my intention to review the South African literature here, but merely to emphasise its operation within the neo-liberal framework of human rights and civil society paradigms. Within this perspective, the tendency is to evaluate the ‘success’ or otherwise of an organisation ‘of ‘ civil society in terms of its ability to influence or lobby government in favour of the group whose interests it is said to represent.